Link management: What it is and why your company needs it

Link management is about the ability to organize, edit, analyze and have complete control over all the links your organization shares – no matter how big or small your company is.

Links are an important asset to any business. They connect your brand with the online world, so its essential that you’re in control of them. Link management presents you with the opportunity to protect your brand and optimize your marketing.

Between social media sharing, email marketing, customer support, admin and internal communications, you probably don’t even have a ballpark estimate of how many links you create or share each year.

But that’s where a central link management tool comes in. From improved collaboration and tracking to safeguarding your brand against a PR crisis, find out why you need to take back control of your links:

Easily brand and manage multiple domains

It’s important to put your brand on your links by using a custom domain name that you have ownership of. Custom short links provide many benefits to marketers, including improved link trust and CTR, increased brand recognition and better link deliverability. But you can also get creative by using different domain names as a base for your short links.

For example, we use Rebrandly.blog to create links to our blog and Rebrandly.support to send FAQs to our customers. With hundreds of domain name extensions, from .social and .news to .coffee and .pizza, the possibilities are endless and you’re sure to find a domain name suited to each department of your business.

Some of our customers have even set up domains just to share links related to a specific promotion or competition. Check out the below example of an automated tweet created after students entered a sweepstake competition run by McAfee and HP.

Registering custom domains for your short links in Rebrandly is a simple process and they can then be handled departmentally within the platform. You can also filter the links in your dashboard by the domain name.

This means marketing teams don’t need to rely on IT departments to set up a new domain and link management is made easy for managers and team members.

The importance of link ownership

When creating short links with your own custom domain, you claim full ownership over them.

Whereas, when you create a link with a third party domain, your short URLs really belong to whoever owns that domain. You can’t edit or manage these links and it’s out of your control who else creates links with that domain. If someone shares spam or other illegitimate content with that domain, your links can end up blacklisted and your emails will end up in the spam folders of customers and prospects.

By using your own domain and a link management tool, this issue is unlikely to arise and if there is ever an issue, you’ll be able to find the source of the problem and quickly address it.

By owning your own domain, you also have control over your link data. This will be stored securely in your link management tool where your click stats are private, which isn’t always the case with other URL shorteners like Bitly.

Link management means better organization and collaboration

Having all your links in a centralized dashboard makes it easier to organize and access them. Teams can be organized into workspaces and given access to different domain names, according to their departments or locations. At Rebrandly, the marketing team can create and share links using our .blog and .news domains, while our customer service team makes use of Rebrandly.support to share FAQs, videos and other useful content.

Depending on the layout of your organization, you could create workspaces by department, country or whatever else might suit you. French multinational, Saint Gobain, has offices in 67 countries around the world and uses Rebrandly so that departments in each country can create custom short links, organized by nation.

Beyond teams, access and permissions can also be edited for each team member and controlled by managers. Colleagues can see each other’s links and share them from within the dashboard. This will prevent the marketing team from creating several links to the one blog post. This helps keep your links more organized and will help later on when you are assessing the success of your marketing efforts.

In your link management platform, you can also keep your links organized by tagging them. You can use color-coded tags to indicate the type of content it is or the campaign it is part of. When searching for a link, team members can filter links by tags, domains or use the search bar.

This kind of centralized link management is important to team collaboration, both internally and externally. Companies can give external vendors access to their link management platform so they can create branded links, but without relinquishing control of the domain itself. While agencies can give access to their clients so they can check in on the progress of campaigns or access links as they please.

Destination control lets you protect your brand

Let’s face it, we’ve all accidentally sent out a link that leads to the wrong destination at some point in our work lives. I used to feel a pang of dread at the prospect everytime I sent out a newsletter via email.

But this isn’t an issue when you have a link management tool like Rebrandly. Whether you need to fix a slip-up or simply want to update your link with the latest information, you can edit the destination URL of your short link.

Having the ability to edit or delete your links is perhaps the most important aspect of link management. There are many situations where this is useful. Beyond fixing an embarrassing human error, you can update your links to lead to the most up-to-date information – whether you want old links to lead to the newest version of your legal policy or your Instagram bio link to lead to your latest vlog.

It’s also very important for protecting your brand. If you send out a press release that has been received negatively, you’ll be able to delete or edit the destination URL quickly to control the situation.

From a legal perspective, link management provides assurance and protection in case something detrimental is ever accidentally shared by your organization. It also allows you to update the destination with relevant content rather than lead browsers to a dead end.

When using a generic or the default link shortener, you’re stuck if anything needs changing. It could take days or even weeks to be updated by busy development teams.

Whereas, link management empowers marketers to use short URLs in campaigns and materials without any risk.

Workforce management company, Kelly Services, for example, use our link management tool to share job opportunities on job sites, in print, on social media and via emails. Once the position is filled, the link’s destination is updated to reflect other relevant content or the latest opportunities.

Put your links to work for your business

Link management platforms let you discern which of your marketing campaigns, channels, and actions are really paying off. With the click data provided, you’ll see that perhaps your curated content is receiving a great reaction, while your blog posts only get a lukewarm reception. You could even see which support FAQs are getting the most clicks, which will indicate areas of the customer experience that you can improve upon.

By using UTM parameters, you can also take your marketing analytics one step further and precisely measure the source level data from every touch point, which is the most accurate way to monitor your traffic sources. With these valuable insights, you can optimize your marketing campaigns.

You can also boost your remarketing campaigns with link retargeting. If you create a link to some positive press coverage, a great review or even some highly relevant industry news, you can add on retargeting pixels from advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. This way you can later retarget ads at those who clicked on these links.

Link management makes sense in the fast-moving environment of digital marketers. It aids smooth collaboration, in-depth tracking, and better organization, while also facilitating an instant fix when something goes wrong.

While social platforms come and go, links are more pervasive and it’s important you have them organized and under control for all the reasons above. Link management tools like Rebrandly can fit seamlessly with your company’s communications. It’s collaborative, secure and can prevent a PR crisis that will damage your brand. Any business, big or small, can benefit from link management and will find it abolishes many of its marketers’ pain points.

For more info on Link Management, be sure to check out our video here!